The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
State Fetishism
Therefore how strikingly fitting, how (unintentionally) magical, is Abrams's
response to the power of the reality-effect of the mask. "My suggestion,"
he writes,
is that we should recognize that cogency of the idea of the state as an
ideological power and treat that as a compelling object of analysis. But
the very reasons that require us to do that also require us not to believe
in the idea of the state, not to concede, even as an abstract formal-object,
the existence of the state.
And as an inspired dada-like shock tactic exercise in how-to pull this off, he
recommends that we should, as an experiment, try substituting the word
God for the word state—which is exactly what I intend to do, since State
fetishism begs just such an excursus, provided one is up to dealing with the
profound ambiguity which, according to one track of influential Western
analysis, the sacred is said to contain.
The Impure Sacred
What I want to consider is the everlastingly curious notion, bound to
raise hackles, that not only God but evil is part of the notion of sacredness—
that bad is not just bad but holy to boot. Emile Durkheim labeled this holy
evil in 1912 as "impure sacred" and scantly illustrated it in but seven pages
in his major work on primitive religion, by reference to the fresh human
corpse, to the forces conjured by the sorcerer, and the blood issuing from
the genital organs of women—all of which, he insisted, from his ethnographic
evidence from central Australia as much as from W. Robertson Smith's The
Religion of the Semites, inspired men with fear, into which horror generally
entered, yet could, through a simple modification of external circumstance,
become holy and propitious powers endowing life. While according to this
formulation there is the most radical anatagonism between the pure and the
impure sacred, there is, nevertheless, close kinship between them as exhibited
in the fact that the respect accorded the pure sacred is not without a measure
of horror, and the fear accorded the impure sacred is not without reverence.
Hence not just Genet the homosexual in a homophobic society, not just
Genet the thief, in a State built on the right to property, but Saint Genet.
Reason & Violence
Before you use a military force, you should use the force of reason.
—Governor Mario Cuomo
Where this confluence of the pure with the impure sacred is most relevant to
the modern State is where the crucial issue of "legitimacy" of the institution
abuts what Max Weber regarded as a crucial part of the definition of the
State—namely, its monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given
territory. The other part of that definition, of course, as with Hegel's, was the
State's embodiment of Reason, as in the bureaucratic forms.
What needs emphasis here is how this conjuncture of violence and reason
is so obvious, and yet is at the same time denied, and therefore how important
it is for acute understanding of the cultural practice of Statecraft to appreciate
the very obtuseness of this obviousness, as when we scratch our heads about
the concept of "war crimes"—it being legal for the US State to incessantly
bomb the Iraqi enemy, but a crime for the Iraqi State to beat up the pilots
dropping the bombs. Such legal niceties testify to the self-contradictory yet
ever more necessary attempts to rationalize violence.
That is why there is something frightening, I think, merely in saying that
this conjunction of reason and violence exists, not only because it makes
violence scary, imbued with the greatest legitimating force there can be,
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reason itself, and not only because it makes reason scary by indicating how
it's snuggled deep into the armpit of terror, but also because we so desperately
need to cling to reason—as instituted—as the bulwark against the terrifying
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anomie and chaos pressing in on all sides. There has to be a reason, and we
have to use reason. Yet another part of us welcomes the fact that reason—
as instituted—has violence at its disposal, because we feel that that very
anomie and chaos will respond to naught else. And consider how we slip in
and out of recognizing and disavowal. Consider this as Stately cultural
practice. Nothing could be more obvious than that the State, with its big S
rearing, uses the sweet talk of reason and reasonable rules as its velvet glove
around the fist of steel. This is folklore. This is an instinctual way of reacting
to the big S. But on the other hand this conjunction of reason-and-violence
rapidly becomes confusing when we slow down a little and try to figure it
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